How SAVO generates leads with analytics

SAVO Group provides cloud-based sales software as well as consulting services, targeting executives in charge of sales, marketing, IT and training with various marketing programs. This January, the company decided it wanted to start tracking revenue as early in the lead generation process as possible to see how many touches a sale would require and what it needed to do to generate more revenue.
“The idea behind our strategy is that we're always ready to pivot the messaging depending on how our audience reacts toward the most viable message,” said Devin Hogan, director-marketing, demand generation, at SAVO Group. “It's very data-driven and extremely agile.”
According to Hogan, analytics can help SAVO align email messaging and assets with a customer's buying process. Lessons learned from the data, for instance, allow SAVO to deliver “timely messages that resonate with the stage the buyer is in. The data that can be pulled from marketing analytics including website data, [data from] Google Analytics, and [data from marketing automation platform] Marketo—is critical to drive the success of both inbound and outbound marketing, and aids in the success of the setup and ongoing management of a lead nurture program,” she said.
For example, SAVO offers a webinar each month, and invitations are emailed out as part of the company's ongoing marketing efforts. Hoping to increase attendance, SAVO's marketing team analyzed Marketo data, looking for similarities among those who had attended prior events, said Phil Nieman, the company's marketing operations manager. They also looked at which sectors were underrepresented in overall webinar attendance.
“We noticed that the message wasn't resonating with those in the financial services market,” Hogan said. “So we recrafted the front-end invite to make it more "financial services-speak' and explain why the subject matter [of the webinar] is so important for that industry.”
In addition, SAVO was able to gather more metrics by doing A/B testing with email messaging as well as subject lines. “We're able to see results very quickly. ... We were able to look at metrics from the initial email and make changes very quickly [as well],” Nieman said. The combination of website analytics, sign-up metrics and email metrics helped boost sign-ups for that month's webinar, quadrupling the number of leads generated by webinars, he said.
Email and search metrics are also being used in other marketing situations. Before the company's recent Web redesign, for instance, the marketing team assessed its email, organic and paid search analytics to determine which keywords and phrases were helping to bring—and keep—people on the site. “People were searching for phrases like "What is sales enablement?' which prompted us to create a page titled "What Is Sales Enablement?' Now it is one of our top 5 most-visited pages. Seeing these patterns of what people are searching for, and if it makes sense serving up that content, you'll start seeing the uptick in return pretty quickly,” Hogan said. This simple process of letting metrics inform site design helped SAVO see a 38% increase in website visitors.